New Kid Help
Help I'm a new kid in town Well I'm glad you're on board, new kid in town. I'll be your imaginary friend to guide you through the problematic 'new kid phase' with my greasy arm wrapped around your shoulder and my unkept oily hair covering the back of my neck. Whats this owo Ever played an RPG before kiddo? Well it's real simple. It's called a role-playing-game. Don't confuse it with the gun of the same name. An RPG (arr-pee-jee) makes the player, also known as you, assume a certain role (usually the shining knight hero of the game). Real simple right? Well that role-playing is where RP (arr-pee) get's its name. It's role-playing. You assume a role and do stuff. The challenge is actually doing said stuff. How to do things Well see, back in the good ol' days when I was your age we had these things called Dragons and Dungeons or whatever. I'm sure you've heard of it before, kiddo. We didn't have no fancy visuals to help us out. We used words and described what our hero in shining armor did, and also what the evil dragon did. It's like a choose your own adventure book but you make it up as you go along. Now in our case we won't be sitting in a round table rolling dice and talking to each other, not at all. You see, we have this fancy thing called the Internet at our disposal. That means I can write something and send it to China and it gets there in mere seconds (or days depending on how godawful your connection is). That sounds cool and all but the downside is that we lose things like body language and tone and all that. We need to replace it. First thing's first, we need a way for our hero to say stuff. Chances are if your hero can't say anything he's gonna have a hard time. Surround this stuff with quotation marks ("). For example, if I wanted my hero Jimmy to say something, I'd type this: "I sell propane and propane accessories" Crazy simple, right? My guy, Jimmy, just said he sells an overused meme! But wait, what if we want to say something to each other but not have our character say it? Well you're in luck my good friend. We have technology for that. Just surrounded it with these fancy things: () (I don't actually sell propane and propane accessories) This is called OOC, Out Of Character. It's super helpful, really nice to use when you need to clarify something or ask about what you're doing next Sunday. It allows us to communicate without using our characters for everything. It'd be kinda weird if Jimmy the Shining Knight said "be right back needa take a pee" right in the middle of a dragon fight. That's why OOC is so magical. Use it, but don't overdo it. Remember, its an arr-pee, not chit-chat hour. If you're spending more time talking as your normal self and not your equivalent of my Jimmy then you're doing it wrong. Okay now that we covered all that, how do we do things like slay the dragon? In a perfect world we could just talk to the dragon and make it realize it was doing something stupid and convince it to give us the princess back or whatever but sadly dragons don't talk that much so we need to kill it. Well never fear, kiddo, I got your back. Using this fine piece of technology, the asterisk (*) we can slay the dragon! Just type what your person does and surround it with these star-shaped things. *Jimmy runs up and does something* or alternatively *I run up and do something* Both ways are technically correct, its just that one uses 'I' instead of your character's name. Some people do this, don't be alarmed. Well kiddo, now that we got the basics, let's move on. The Kitchen of Text Look at your text box. Look at your little text things we use to describe what our hero does. See your text box as your kitchen and your little text things as your tools. The words you write between them are your ingredients. While RPing, your job is to be a good chef. Cook us up some good dishes of descriptive actions and meaningful dialog. "hi sally" *runs and catches up to sally* This right here is something Gordon Ramsey would probably yell at you for thirty minutes for. It's so bad that it makes dry soup look good. If you cooked this up, the government would shut down your kitchen for poisoning your customers. You're supposed to be a five star chef and you just cooked up a BLT without the bread, bacon, lettuce, or tomatoes just leaving your customer with a steaming pile of absolutely nothing and when they asked for the food you replace that pile with a steaming pile of elephant turds with a "bon appetit" and a "tip big" on the receipt. You failed as a chef. Let's try again. "Hey, sally! Wait up!" *Bobby runs, trying to catch up to Sally, waving his hand in the air* Well this is better. It's not a three course five-star meal by any means but at least you made something edible. You cooked up a decent, though short, response which would be appropriate in a real arr-pee. You used your tools well, you used good, healthy amounts of text (aka ingredients), and most importantly you could actually (vaguely) picture Bobby running with his hand waving in the air in your mind. "Sally, may you please slow down? I require more time in order to propel my body forwards through space using my leg muscles in a specific fashion in order to match your rate of movement" *My hand waves as though it were a flag, signaling for Sally's attention, in attempts to convince her to do as I asked earlier.* As you can see here though, big isn't always good. The customer asked for a BLT and you just served up fifty loaves of bread with a gallon of mayonnaise, an entire farm's worth of tomatoes, and twenty live pigs oinking furiously, slowly being crushed by an entire metric ton of lettuce. Although you might shock Gordon Ramsey long enough to where he doesn't yell at you, that doesn't mean you did a good job. There is a difference between being descriptive and being awful. And you just crossed into awful territory. That's bad. Don't do that. Try to emulate the same level of detail you read in a good book (or at least just the level of detail the others are using). Congratulations, you've graduated! You're no longer a total new kid to role-playing. You now know how to do things now. You know how to do basic actions and speech, as well as knowing how to not be an awful chef in your kitchen. Get out there and make me proud. The next time we meet, we'll be going over how to not suck in Mourncrest in particular. Until then, xX_MEEMSTAR_Xx out! Category:Help